by Tim Powers
Canino laid her carefully on the far side of the truck bed, then hopped down and lifted her. “She’s tranked,” he called to Marrity. “She’ll be out for an hour.” He started toward the open passenger-side door, then paused and looked back over his shoulder. “Knock down the tent and toss all the stuff off onto the ground. And find a rope or a cleat or something you’ll be able to hang on to—it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.”
Charlotte and Marrity were lying in darkness in the back of a roaring, rocking van, their ankles attached by cables and a padlock to a ring in the floor by the back doors. Malk was up front driving. The Chaplin slab and the boxed-up glass cylinder and gold wire from Grammar’s shed were in another van with Mishal and Lepidopt, along with a bomb that Mishal assured them was powerful enough to completely destroy the entire Einstein machine, Chaplin slab and all.
Ten minutes earlier Charlotte had been sitting beside Frank Marrity on the Wigwam Motel bed, watching through Lepidopt’s eyes as he and Malk draped blankets over the rectangular block of cement, looped canvas straps around it, and then taped two Styrofoam heads with toupees on them onto the top edge of it.
“When the vans get here,” Lepidopt had told Malk, “we can walk this out to them. Whatever it looks like we’re up to, it won’t be smuggling a square from the Chinese Theater.”
Malk had nodded. “And if somebody shoots at us, they’re as likely to hit those guys as us,” he said, nodding at the Styrofoam heads.
Lepidopt’s glance had gone to the toupees, then resolutely away.
“You don’t need a lot of yarmulkes,” Malk had said.
Then Marrity had leaped up from the bed with a smothered yell. “Daphne is falling!” he had said urgently. “No—it’s like on Sunday when she watched that movie—wow, she grabbed some building, and it’s burning, completely on fire—” His arm had twitched then, and he’d winced. “And now—I can’t sense her at all, she’s gone! My God, did they kill her?”
“Gave her a tranquilizer,” Mishal had said. “In the arm, from the way you jumped. Whatever the building is that she torched, they’ll have to get out of there. They’re moving. So are we.”
And within minutes the vans had arrived and they were moving.
Marrity had asked why he and Charlotte had to be tied to the floor, but Charlotte had answered him. “None of us are really allies.”
“What she said,” Malk had agreed, snapping the padlock closed, then slamming the back doors and walking around outside to get into the driver’s seat.
The interior of the speeding van smelled of potting soil and flowers, and Marrity guessed it was a florist’s van when not commandeered for Mossad use. At least someone had thrown a couple of blankets over the plywood floor. It proved more comfortable just to stretch out and lie down than to try to sit up against the walls with their feet moored to the ring.
For Charlotte’s sake as much as his own, Marrity craned his neck to look toward the front; the windshield was just a patch of lighter darkness except when a rushing streetlight lit the arched dust streaks on it, and he could just see the top of Malk’s head above the driver’s-seat headrest. Marrity and Charlotte were effectively restrained—even if Marrity had stretched, he wouldn’t have been able to reach the back of the driver’s seat.
In order to whisper, it was easiest to lie facing one another, with their arms around each other to keep from rolling back and forth. Marrity could feel the shape of a revolver against the small of Charlotte’s back.
“I hope Daphne will be all right till we get there,” whispered Marrity. He realized that he had said this already a few times, and grinned apologetically, though it was too dark in the back of the van for her to see, even if she’d been able to see. “And I hope my breath’s not too horrible.”
Charlotte kissed his lips lightly. “Your breath smells like Canadian Club,” she whispered. “I like it. Daphne’s fine. It’s you they want to kill, and we won’t let them do that.” He felt her shiver in his arms. “Maybe they will trade me for her.”
“We’ll rescue her. And the Mossad will do the time-travel errand you want done.”
“Right now they’ve got a bomb sitting next to that time machine. I’ll have to decide when we get there whether or not I trust them to do what that Mishal guy promised. He sort of promised, didn’t he?”
Marrity nodded in the rocking darkness. “Sort of,” he added.
“I’d have a totally different life. I’d never meet you, or Daphne, and that’s sad. I’d probably still be in the air force right now. Well, it was the army, really—INSCOM, Intelligence and Security Command, working originally out of Fort Meade in Maryland, though I was a little kid then. And I won’t have been blinded in 1978. And I won’t have done—she won’t, the girl I’ll be, won’t have any memory of…people I’ve betrayed. I’d kill myself, but all the things I’ve done would stay done.” She exhaled. Her breath smelled like whiskey too.
Marrity brushed her hair with his fingers, feeling the frames of her sunglasses.
She hugged him and pressed her forehead against his collarbone. “Or maybe,” she whispered into his shirt, “I’ll decide the Mossad can’t or won’t fix it for me, and just let the Vespers negate me. I’d never have met you then either.”
He opened his mouth, but she put a finger on his lips. Pulling her head back and speaking loudly, she asked, “How much longer to Palm Springs?” Marrity could feel her heartbeat through the piece of damp paper against his stomach.
“Forty minutes,” said Malk.
Marrity’s hand was still in her hair; when she lowered her head, he kissed her on the lips.
“An hour from now we might all be dead,” she whispered into his mouth, “or worse.” He felt her lips smile under his. “Your heart is going like crazy.”
They kissed again, and for a long time there was no more whispering in the back of the van that raced east down the dark 10 freeway.
Lepidopt was driving the other van, and Mishal was in the passenger seat. The taillights of Malk’s van seemed motionless a hundred yards ahead in the freeway lane while the world rushed past, whistling in the wind wing by Lepidopt’s left hand on the steering wheel.
The van belonged to a sayan who ordinarily lived in it, with a cat, and the interior smelled sourly of cat box.
“Whatever happens with this meeting,” said Mishal, “this silly proposed trade of girls, you’ll follow your orders today—this morning. I’ll try to learn something about this singularity in the tower, and if possible I’ll relay it over the radio for you to add to your report, but you have to use the machine to jump back to 1967. As soon as I’ve relayed all I can find out, or at the very first sign of any trouble, you go. You heard Einstein’s ghost say how to do it. Right?”
“Right,” said Lepidopt.
“And you’ve got your, your homing device?”
Mishal was referring to Lepidopt’s dried finger, which was still in the Flix chocolate box in his pocket. In 1928 Einstein had been guided to his destination in the past by a bullet shell, which struck Lepidopt as a much more dignified sort of talisman.
“Got it.”
“Can you feel your target sites yet, those pieces of glass? They should be set up by now.”
Lepidopt tried to stretch his mind outward, past the haze of the whiskey, to a piece of oily glass on Mount Wilson and another in Death Valley. He didn’t get any clear impression. “No,” he said.
“Well, you probably have to be out of your body to sense them. You can still do an astral projection, I hope! You got good marks for that, in your training.”
“I did? I hated it.” Lepidopt shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat at the memory of hovering weightlessly under some ceiling and seeing his limp body slumped on a couch on the other side of a room.
“Assuming it works,” Lepidopt said, “do you want me to tell Isser Harel in 1967 that we’ve agreed to change some part of the past for Charlotte Sinclair, in exchange for her help?”
For a moment Mis
hal was silent. Then, “The thing the Zohar predicted,” he said. “The ‘knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom.’ You want to use that to fix some divorce or childhood trauma or something for that woman?” He shook his head. “You don’t throw what’s precious to dogs.”
Lepidopt asked, “What’s precious to dogs?” Mishal didn’t laugh, and Lepidopt flexed his maimed right hand on the gearshift. “I’ll be changing the past,” he said. “From 1967 on.”
“Right,” said Mishal. “The Yom Kippur War will certainly go differently in the new time line you’ll help initiate. A lot of things will.”
“I, uh, got married in 1972,” said Lepidopt, ashamed to be bringing it up. “My son was born in 1976. He’s eleven now.”
“That would follow, yes.” Mishal sniffed. “I hope I don’t smell the way this van does, when I meet these people.”
“I wonder—if he’ll still be born. That is, if he’ll still be born. What if something I change—like a whole war—makes my younger self and his wife conceive the boy on a different night? What if the child is a girl, this time around? What if there is no child? My younger self in this new time line might die before fathering him.”
“Unlikely—especially with you, the elder you, looking out for his safety. You can tell Harel that that’s a condition of your cooperation.”
“But I can’t eliminate the possibility of my younger self dying. Much less eliminate the possibility that my son won’t be conceived exactly as it happened originally.” Lepidopt bared his teeth at the dark freeway lanes under the lightening eastern sky. “The boy I know might turn out never to have existed.”
“All of us are at risk,” said Mishal. “There might be a war six years from now in which your son will be killed, if you don’t do this.”
“But if he’s killed, he’ll at least have existed,” Lepidopt said, knowing he was pushing a point Mishal considered settled.
“All our sons and daughters,” said Mishal sternly, “and wives and parents, are at risk every day. Do you know what this thing in the Sinai desert is, at the Rephidim stone, that you’re to copy out?” He laughed. “Well no, of course you don’t. None of us does. But according to old manuscripts that never made it into the Sepher ha-Bahir compilation in the twelfth century, it’s a way to travel in all the worlds of the Sephirot, not just in four or even five dimensions. It could make this time machine look like the Wright brothers’s airplane.”
“I see,” said Lepidopt.
Mishal waved a hand, acknowledging Lepidopt’s previous point. “God won’t lose sight of any of us. Not of us. Do you think that machine can change God’s memory? It would be disrespectful, as well as wrong, to think so.”
Can I have that in writing? thought Lepidopt; but he simply kept the gas pedal pressed to the floor and watched the taillights of Malk’s van.
Twenty-seven
Old Frank Marrity was glad to see the last of the flatbed truck as it turned left out of the hospital parking lot, heading south, though when its taillights had disappeared down Indian Canyon Drive he could still for a moment see the foolish chair mounted on the back of it.
He had managed to throw the tent and all the electronic equipment off the truck bed, in painful, sweating haste by the glare of the burning cabin, but that damned chair had been bolted to the wood. Canino had tied Golze’s wheelchair to it, and Marrity had had to hang on to it, cursing and several times half sliding off the truck altogether during the bumpy half-hour drive down the mountain road to Palm Springs.
He had barely been able to crawl off the truck bed when they had finally stopped here in the hospital parking lot.
The few cars that whispered past now on the street beyond the sidewalk trees still had their headlights on, and the breeze was pleasantly cool, but the sky was already deep blue and in half an hour or so the sun would be rising over the distant Santa Rosa Mountains.
Across a sidewalk and a narrow lawn, the square, four-story tower loomed in gray shadow against the cloudless sky. Peering up at it, he could see a corner of the belfry ceiling through the west-facing arch at the top. The low tile-roofed building at its foot was medical offices now, but the tower had reputedly once been the highest structure in this desert village, the crown of the long-gone El Mirador Hotel.
Three Vespers cars had pulled into the lot ten minutes ago, and Marrity was leaning against the left-rear door of one of them, a brown-and-white Chrysler Fifth Avenue that was brand new but looked very old-fashioned and boxy to him. When will I see Saturns again? he thought. Lexuses? Geos?
The driver’s-side door was open and the haggard-looking woman who was apparently Rascasse was sitting in the driver’s seat, listening to the multiband radio. She smelled like stale bread this morning.
“We, uh, talked our way into the house,” said a voice from the speaker, “and the cement block they had was just a section of sidewalk. Decoy. One of the renters there eventually directed us to a place called the Wigwam Motel, and the people we want had been there but have cleared out. Nothing in the room.”
“Okay,” said Rascasse in her new contralto voice. “Get here as quickly as you can.”
Marrity couldn’t see Golze in the passenger seat, but in the predawn quiet he clearly heard his frail voice: “They’re working from a mobile base now.”
“Indeed,” said Rascasse, “and they’ll be heading this way.” She spoke into the radio again. “Prime.”
“Tierce,” came a tinny reply from the speaker.
“They’re bringing Charlotte here to make the trade. But probably there’ll be a vehicle accompanying them, a truck or van, that will be visible to human eyes but not to astral sight—not to my mind. Get—oleander.” Marrity saw the old woman lean forward briefly, and then she sat back and went on, “Get the copter here, and have him circle and describe to me all traffic on the streets. Not models, just…‘a white van, a blue car ahead of it, a red car passing both of them’…like that.”
“Right. Later.”
The man who had driven up in the Chrysler was pacing the sidewalk a hundred feet away; the other two drivers were still sitting in their cars. Marrity wondered irritably what Vespers men did on their days off. Maybe they never got days off.
Marrity took a deep breath and then spoke. “You don’t need to do this negation thing with anybody,” he said. “You’ll have the machine itself within the hour, and then you’ll be able to go back and fix things, not just, just—start chronological avalanches! All you’ve got to do is kill D-Daphne, like you agreed to.” He realized he was nodding like a monkey, and made himself stop. “That was part of our agreement, in the boat on the lake.”
In this situation, he was certain, he was doing all that remained to be done for poor Daphne. If they killed her, she would at least have had a life; but if they negated her, there would never have been any Daphne Marrity at all. And how much of his own memories, his own identity, were tied up with her? He himself would become an entirely different person if she were negated, a person unimaginable to him now.
“We haven’t got the machine yet,” croaked Golze.
The two Mossad vans were parked in shadow at the end of West Tahquitz Canyon Way, in front of a house that was half hidden behind palm trees and honeysuckle and grapevines. A wrought-iron arch with an unlit lantern hanging from its curlicued peak opened on a stone stairway barely visible in the tree shadows beyond, and to the left Lepidopt could make out the two-or three-story house, with doors and windows deeply inset in thick, pale walls. A mailbox was mounted on one pole of the arch and a plastic rake leaned against the other. Mishal said Einstein had stayed here in 1931 and had hidden attention-deflecting stone amulets in the terraced garden behind the house.
They were seven blocks south of the El Mirador Medical Plaza, about half an hour short of dawn.
During the drive from San Bernardino to Palm Springs, the van had been a moving pocket of warmth and dashboard lights and a pair of glowing cigarettes in the lonely rock-studded hills in the predawn da
rkness, and the only signs of human habitation in the landscape of jagged ridges and remote, tilted alluvial deltas had been one line of half a dozen trailer trucks pulled off on the shoulder, and the twin red dots of Malk’s taillights in the otherwise empty lane ahead. Lepidopt had been glad to turn off the freeway onto State Highway 111 and follow it into the sleeping town of Palm Springs, with its low, plain 1950s-style office buildings, its shops with aluminum foil covering the windows, and its dark ranch houses with gravel yards.
“It’s about time to divvy the cargo,” said Mishal now, unsnapping his seat belt. “Handcuff Marrity in here with the Einstein machine, where you can blow both of them to smithereens if worse comes to worse. Then you and Bert just circle around town in it, and try to stay in touch with me via the radio.”
He tucked the Azden microphone-transmitter into his shirt pocket and clipped the microphone under his collar. The trouble with body microphones was that the crystal-controlled transmitters were as big as a deck of cards, and couldn’t transmit farther than a few city blocks at the best of times, and a human body tended to block the radio waves.
“If you can’t hear me,” said Mishal, “just jump at dawn. You can at least bring Harel the news that the singularity Einstein appeared to refer to may exist in that tower. Once you’ve jumped, all of this”—his wave took in the other van too, with Charlotte and Marrity in it, and all of Palm Springs—“won’t ever have happened.”
“Different courses for all of us,” Lepidopt agreed in a level voice. He thought of being able to swim in the ocean again, and listen to Rimsky-Korsakov again, and then he thought of Louis back in Tel Aviv.
“Arm the thing,” said Mishal, opening the passenger-side door. A puff of cool, sage-scented air dispelled the interior smells of cat box and cigarette smoke.
Lepidopt unsnapped his seat belt and stood up in a crouch to shuffle into the back of the van. He switched on the overhead bulb.